Sunday, 1 June 2008

Thematic Mapping Engine

It's time to introduce the Thematic Mapping Engine (TME). In my previous blog posts, I've shown various techniques of how geobrowsers can be used for thematic mapping. The goal has been to explore the possibilites and to make these techniques available to a wider audience. The Tematic Mapping Engine provides an easy-to-use web interface where you can create visually appealing maps on-the-fly.

So far only prism maps are supported, but other thematic mapping techniques will be added in the upcoming weeks. The engine returns a KMZ file that you can open in Google Earth or download to your computer. My primary data source is UNdata.

The above visualisation is generated by TME (download KMZ) and shows child mortaility in the world (UNdata).

The Thematic Mapping Engine is also an example of what you can achieve with open source tools and datasets in the public domain:

44 comments:

Tried it, and I'm only seeing black as the color in all cases (no grading based on value). Prisms are being drawn, and do change height with time during time series, but they're very hard to see (black on black). Any ideas?

Never mind - found the problem - probably a GE bug. I had the sun turned off; if I turn the sun on, and then off again, it displays correctly. If I resize my display with the sun off, it goes dark again, but turning the sun on and off again brings it back. Obvious ;-).

Nice app, BTW! Are you going to add the ability to import your own data?

I like the technique, thematic maps are powerful tools and good to see you making it easier to produce them in GE. However, IMHO prism maps don't really work in GE, simple color differences works much better. For more detail see here.

HI,I am an intern for the Institute for Creative Technology working on a project for Cultural Environmental Annotations. I stumbled onto this "Thematic Mapping Engine" and found it to be very intriguing. My concentration is in the area of ethnocultural characteristics with focus on dominant ethic cultures world wide. I am interested in learning more about embedding UNdata of ethical dominance into TME that would allow me to use this source as a plug-in to GE. Is this possible, and how do I do it?

I am new to the GE community so the geographical units I am not fully aware of as of yet. My focus is primarily in the Middle East in Iraq. I want to be able to show in GE the most dominant to least dominant of the Sunni, Shia, and Shi'ite religion due to their "geographical location" in that particular area. So if you could provide an example of what I describe, I would like to stay in contact with you to possibly learn more about how to embed this type of information across the GE community. This is totally a non-profit organization. We are working to aid the military for better strategical learning of environmental differences.

I'm a brazilian oceanographer and developed a application to spacialize sustainable development indicators using GD Library of PHP. It's so easy and useful !I'll register my email at this site and wait anxixously the notice of the download opportunity !

I think that FOSS is a good solution to the problems of everybody ! So, I wish that You'll obtain sucess with this great initiative !!

You should be able to do that by wrapping the borders into different Folders and attach timestamps to the folders. It is actually what the Thematic Mapping Engine is doing, except that the borders are repeated for each time period.

I am not familiar with PostGIS, MySQL and Php programming, but only VB, Access and Excel. I have some country statistics in MS-Excel and MS-Access that I would like to see ploted in a kml format. So I have 1 questions and 2 suggestion. Question: Do you have the code in VB to read from shapefile and another code to create a KML file? Since I think you may not have it at hand, I have a suggestion. Suggestions: The engine you developed is great, so why don't you develop a format in DBF or TXT/CSV, so that any user could upload a file (with country name/index and the statistics) to the engine, make all the setup and receive a nice KML file? It would be also lovely to have a stand-alone version of the engine to run it in a Windows environment.

I love your idea, just wish that it would be more flexible with the data input - is there the possibility to include Cancer mortality from UNdata which I would love to visualise for a presentation at my university?http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?q=cancer&d=WHO&f=inID%3aMBD23

I use the engine as part of a GE exercise for my World Regional Geography courses, but unfortunately since January 2016 it hasn't been working. Any chance this engine will be back up and working again? It's such a great way to get students interested in Google Earth and mapping. Thanks for your work. Cheers, Emariana WidnerKent State UniversityOhio, U.S.A

A great resource. I have noted that the Google Earth plugin fails to display a preview of a map showing mobile usage per 100 inhabitants yet the same map downloaded as a kmz file may be viewed using Google earth desktop application.